Front Table 12/8

On This Week's Front Table, dive into the holiday season with new works that explore from the farthest reaches of the universe to the smallest moments of our hidden lives. Our non-fiction selections include a buzzy new book on the secret search for alien intelligence, an intimate biography of a musical and artistic supernova, and a fresh look at ancient medicine through the lens of evolving medical technology. If something more literary is what you're after during these chilly nights, check out a family-centered poetry collection from an acclaimed Osage author, a triplet of stories examining gender from one of Ireland's best, a work in translation that investigates the nature of love in Basque Country, and a poignant pandemic novel set in modern-day Brooklyn. Explore these titles and more at semcoop.com.

UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government's Search for Alien Life Here—and Out There
(Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster)
Garrett M. Graff

For as long as we have looked to the skies, the question of whether life on Earth is the only life to exist has been at the core of the human experience, driving scientific debate and discovery, shaping spiritual belief, and prompting existential thought across borders and generations. And yet, the idea of extraterrestrial intelligence has been largely seen as a joke, banished to the realm of fantasy and conspiracy. Now, for the first time, the full story of our national obsession with UFOs—and the covert, decades-long search by scientists, the United States military, and the CIA for proof of alien life—is told by bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize finalist Garrett M. Graff in a deeply reported and researched history.


Tupac Shakur: The Authorized Biography
(Crown) 
Staci Robinson

Tupac Shakur is one of the greatest and most controversial artists of all time. More than a quarter of a century after his tragic death in 1996 at the age of just twenty-five, he continues to be one of the most misunderstood, complicated, and influential figures in modern history. Drawing on exclusive access to Tupac’s private notebooks, letters, and uncensored conversations with those who loved and knew him best, this estate-authorized biography by author and screenwriter Staci Robinson paints the fullest and most intimate picture to date of the young man who became a legend for generations to come.


Tools and the Organism: Technology and the Body in Ancient Greek and Roman Medicine
(University of Chicago Press) 
Colin Webster

Medicine is itself a type of technology, involving therapeutic tools and substances, and so one can write the history of medicine as the application of different technologies to the human body. In Tools and the Organism, Colin Webster argues that, throughout antiquity, these tools were crucial to broader theoretical shifts. Notions changed about what type of object a body is, what substances constitute its essential nature, and how its parts interact. By following these changes and taking the question of technology into the heart of Greek and Roman medicine, Webster reveals how the body was first conceptualized as an “organism”—a functional object whose inner parts were tools, or organa, that each completed certain vital tasks. He also shows how different medical tools created different bodies.


Tallchief
(Magic City Books) 
Elise Paschen

A stunning poetry collection from acclaimed Osage poet, Elise Paschen. This special release features new and collected works about the poet’s mother, legendary ballerina, Maria Tallchief including the poem “Wi’-gi-e,” which inspired the title for David Grann’s book and Martin Scorsese’s film, Killers of the Flower Moon.


So Late in the Day: Stories of Women and Men
(Grove) 
Claire Keegan

Celebrated for her powerful short fiction, considered “among the form’s most masterful practitioners” (New York Times), Claire Keegan now gifts us three exquisite stories, newly revised and expanded, together forming a brilliant examination of gender dynamics and an arc from Keegan’s earliest to her most recent work. In “So Late in the Day,” Cathal faces a long weekend as his mind agitates over a woman with whom he could have spent his life, had he behaved differently; in “The Long and Painful Death,” a writer’s arrival at the seaside home of Heinrich Böll for a residency is disrupted by an academic who imposes his presence and opinions; and in “Antarctica,” a married woman travels out of town to see what it’s like to sleep with another man and ends up in the grip of a possessive stranger.


The Worst Thing of All Is the Light
(Seagull Books) 
José Luis Serrano, tr. Lawrence Schimel

The Worst Thing of All Is the Light tells two stories. First, that of the friendship of two heterosexual men, Koldo and Edorta, through the decades of the late twentieth century in Spain’s Basque Country. In the book Edorta writes in order to try and save from oblivion his relationship with Koldo—a bond for which the word “friendship” falls short yet for which he is too afraid to use the word “love.” It is the story of two men who are in love and don’t know it, or don’t want to know it. The second story is that of its author, José Luis Serrano, in the present day as he enjoys his summer holiday in the same Basque Country and talks with his husband at length about many different things, but mostly about how to narrate the relationship of Koldo and Edorta, two men who did not allow themselves to construct the domestic life that their counterparts enjoy today. Together these stories show a love that the lovers hope will outlive them, a love that is the same even if we give it different labels.


Day: A Novel
(Random House) 
Michael Cunningham

April 5, 2019: In a cozy brownstone in Brooklyn, the veneer of domestic bliss is beginning to crack. Dan and Isabel, husband and wife, are slowly drifting apart--and both, it seems, are a little bit in love with Isabel's younger brother, Robbie. Robbie, wayward soul of the family, who still lives in the attic loft; Robbie, who, trying to get over his most recent boyfriend, is living vicariously through a glamorous avatar online; Robbie, who now has to move out of the house--and whose departure threatens to break the family apart. And then there is Nathan, age ten, taking his first uncertain steps toward independence, while his sister, Violet, five, does her best not to notice the growing rift between her parents.

April 5, 2020: As the world goes into lockdown, the cozy brownstone is starting to feel more like a prison. Violet is terrified of leaving the windows open, obsessed with keeping her family safe. Isabel and Dan communicate mostly in veiled sleights and frustrated sighs. And dear Robbie is stranded in Iceland, alone in a mountain cabin with nothing but his thoughts--and his secret Instagram life--for company.

April 5, 2021 Emerging from the worst of the crisis, the family reckons with a new, very different reality--and with what they've learned, what they've lost, and how they might go on.